It
is a little known fact of history that, during the siege of Vicksburg,
General Ulysses S. Grant issued an order barring Jewish merchants
from entering the Union camps to conduct business. President Abraham
Lincoln promptly countermanded the order. What prompted General
Grants action or President Lincolns rescission of his
order we will never know. It is an incident which historians never
discuss. Was this an early instance of American anti-Semitism?

After the
U.S. Civil War, the southern plantation system was destroyed along
with its system of slave labor. The northern states saw an extraordinary
industrial boom spurred by the railroads. During the Civil War years,
Thomas Edison worked as a newsboy in a railroad car for the Grand
Trunk Railroad line running between Port Huron and Detroit in southeastern
Michigan. A few years later, he was a telegraph operator.

Edison invented
a transmitter and receiver for an automatic telegraph system, and
then a quadraplex telegraph, and an improved stock ticker. In the
1870s he maintained a research laboratory from which came important
inventions such as the electric light bulb, phonograph recordings,
carbon telephone transmitter, and motion-picture machine. Then,
in 1881, he built the worlds first electric power plant in
New York City.

Edison,
whose formal education was limited to three months of schooling,
became the most prolific inventor in American industry. He was a
home-grown American genius, a self-taught expert in technologies
related to electricity. Through native intelligence and hard work,
Edison and his assistants laid the foundation for both the electric-power
and 20th Century entertainment industries. This was a distinct kind
of heroic American identity.

Henry
Ford

Now shift
attention to another American inventor born about the time of the
Vicksburg siege. This was Henry Ford, who, like Edison, was also
raised in southeastern Michigan. Ford had a grade-school education
before working several years on his fathers farm. Then he
became an apprentice in a machine shop in Detroit where he began
experimenting with automobiles propelled by the internal-combustion
engine. He later became an engineer with the Detroit Edison Company,
the electrical-power provider for Detroit. It was during this time
that Henry Ford first met Edison who encouraged him in his work.

In 1903,
Henry Ford and others organized the Ford Motor Company. Ford himself
became the majority shareholder four years later and eventually
sole owner of the company. Ford concentrated on perfecting a standard
product, the Model T, and then upon developing production techniques
that would allow him to produce a large number of automobiles at
a steadily decreasing per-unit cost. That, in turn, allowed the
Ford Motor Company to offer its product at a price that many Americans
would afford. Sales of Ford products soared, creating a demand for
even more production and the greater cost efficiencies that Fords
automobile assembly lines could provide.

If that
were not enough, Henry Ford also set his eyes upon growing the consumer
market. In 1914, the Ford Motor Company began paying its employees
a minimum $5-per-day wage, capping daily work hours at eight. Ford
did this not in response to union or competitive pressures but,
he said, because he wanted workers to be able to afford the products
they made. He also unilaterally reduced daily and weekly work hours
because he wanted workers to have enough time to make full use of
the products that they made. This was a revolutionary vision which,
more than any other, was responsible for creating the U.S. consumer
mass market.

In the process,
Henry Ford became one of the richest men on earth. He did not live
lavishly but instead thought of himself as someone who was in a
position to enrich humanity. After his death, the bulk of shares
in Ford Motor Company stock went to the Ford Foundation, one of
the largest philanthropic endowments of all time. Ford also paid
particular attention to American culture. He created a kind of theme
park near his home in Dearborn, Michigan, called Greenfield Village,
which was a reproduction of an early American village that included,
however, such attractions as Stephen Fosters home and Edisons
Menlo Park laboratory. There was also a large museum devoted to
technology. A paternalistic employer, Henry Ford encouraged his
employees to practice square dancing and engage in other wholesome
American pastimes.

Its
clear that Henry Ford was making a powerful bid to shape the American
identity. He was making it possible for Americans to enjoy lives
of greater prosperity and leisure while remaining true to their
national culture. America was a land of industrial progress to which
the average citizen might become an heir. The well-publicized photographs
of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, John Burroughs,
and Luther Burbank, sometimes joined by President Warren G. Harding,
taking a camping trip together, projected an image of the good life
in America. It was a combination of the modern and the traditional,
the best that our society had to offer.

Why is it,
then, that Americans seem to have forgotten the positive side of
Henry Ford and instead tend to think of him as a thuggish character?
One reason is that in the early 1920s the Ford Motor Company published
a newspaper called the Dearborn Independent which discussed
Jewish control of international banking and related subjects. This
newspaper also reprinted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
A Jewish friend complained to Henry Ford that this newspaper was
harming Jews in Europe and, upon receiving proof, Ford suspended
publication. But the fact that Ford had lent his support to such
views has been enough to brand him as a hard-core anti-Semite.

Another
reason for Fords negative reputation is that he strongly resisted
union representation for his employees. Ford was a paternalist who
thought that his employees did not need a union to receive better
wages and working conditions. Ford also had a fancy for ex-convicts.
He hired a man named Harry Bennett to deal with the union organizers.
A famous photograph shows Walter Reuther with blood running from
his nose after Fords security forces had run him and a fellow
organizer off the property. But the union persisted in its campaign
and Ford capitulated. He later told a friend that his wife had threatened
to divorce him if the union troubles continued.

Today, the
anti-Semitism charge, above all, continues to stain Fords
reputation. Adolf Hitler admired Ford, perhaps in part because of
the Dearborn Independent. Photographs of Henry Ford
standing next to German military officers who were bestowing upon
him an award are still widely circulated. But Ford was not a Nazi
sympathizer or one with strong political views of any kind. Though
he allowed a Ford factory to be built in the Soviet Union during
the 1930s, for instance, he also did not sympathize with communism.
When the United States went to war against Nazi Germany, the Ford
Motor Company immediately converted to war production.

Yet, there
is no doubt that Ford in the early 1920s shared the view that Jews
were involved in a hidden conspiracy that threatened the society
he held dear. Could some of the following events have influenced
his thinking?

In 1914,
the Federal Reserve Bank, a focus of conspiratorial thinking even
today, was established. During World War I, the Wilson administration
put Bernard Baruch, a Jew, in charge of the War Industries Board.
Ford was savagely criticized when he went to Europe on a peace mission
in 1915 in an attempt to end World War I. In 1919, Henry Ford submitted
to intense, embarrassing cross-examination related to his level
of education in a libel suit against the Chicago Tribune. Worst
of all, some bankers tried to take control of the Ford Motor Company
away from Ford during a liquidity squeeze brought on by economic
recession in 1921.

While it
is unclear to what extent Jews played a part in these various distressing
events, Ford had clearly been under intense personal and business
pressure that was likely to have produced strong attitudes in him
about hostile forces threatening his well being.

Charles
A. Lindbergh

Now consider
a third figure in the group of American heroes who contributed to
technological progress. Charles Lindbergh, too, was born in Detroit
although he was raised in Little Falls, Minnesota. His father served
in the U.S. House of Representatives. Lindbergh attended the University
of Wisconsin for a short time and then dropped out to pursue flying.
He became an air-mail pilot.

Lindbergh
then arranged for an airplane to be produced so that he could compete
for a prize of $25,000 for the first successful flight across the
Atlantic ocean. In May 1927, he personally flew that plane, The
Spirit of St. Louis, across the ocean landing in Paris. His solo
flight caught the imagination of people around the world. Personally
handsome, Lindbergh became an overnight celebrity. He married the
attractive daughter of Dwight Morrow, a U.S. diplomat. The couple
flew airplanes together, raised children, and generally remained
in the spotlight as a model of American personality.

In the 1930s,
their fortunes took a turn for the worse when a son was kidnapped
and murdered. The Lindbergh family moved to England. Charles Lindbergh
engaged in various projects including work on an artificial heart.
He monitored the development of aircraft, becoming convinced that
the Germans had taken the lead in this area. In 1939, he returned
to the United States to argue against U.S. participation in the
European war that was just beginning.

Lindbergh
became a prominent member of the America First Committee,
a group of business leaders and others who believed that the Roosevelt
administration was maneuvering to bring the nation into World War
II on the side of England. Lindbergh gave a controversial speech
in Des Moines, Iowa, in which he identified American Jews as one
of three pro-war groups.
He had said: "Their (the Jews') greatest danger lies in large
ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio
and our government. We cannot blame them for looking out for what
they believe to be their interests, but we also must look out for
ours."

When war
was declared with Germany and Japan, Lindbergh promptly offered
his services to the administration. He was eventually allowed to
serve in the Pacific theater, where he flew combat missions and
shot down two enemy aircraft. After the war, Lindbergh was a consultant
to Pan American Airlines. He and his wife published books. Increasingly,
his interests turned to conservation. Charles Lindbergh died in
the 1970s in Hawaii, where he is buried.

Lindberghs
life parallels that of Henry Ford in several respects. Besides the
Michigan connection, both were men of immense mechanical ability
who contributed to the transportation industry. Both built their
own machines. Both were widely admired in their time. They were
personal friends. Ford and Lindbergh worked together on activities
of the America First Committee. Lindbergh later worked
as a consultant to the Ford Motor Company in Detroit during the
early war years when Ford was gearing up to produce military aircraft.
Lindbergh, like Ford, became a magnet for accusations of anti-Semitism.

In Lindberghs
case, the accusations are supported by several trips which the famed
aviator made to Germany in the 1930s. Lindbergh never met Hitler,
but he did meet Herman Goering and others involved in German aviation.
Lindbergh also received a medal from the German government which
he refused to return when asked to do so by Jewish groups. Lindbergh
and his wife wrote books which cast the Nazi government in a favorable
light. And, of course, Charles Lindbergh was a prominent member
of the America First Committee that sought to prevent
the U.S. Government from entering World War II on the side of England
and against Germany.

There was
clearly bad blood between Charles Lindbergh and the American Jewish
community. In this case, however, we have Lindberghs side
of the story as told in a book, The Wartime Journals of Charles
A. Lindbergh, published by Harcourt Brace.

It may be
that the trouble began in conflict between journalists or newsreel
photographers and Lindbergh, a celebrity who wanted his privacy.
Lindbergh believed that the newsreel photographers were primarily
Jewish. He wrote that on his honeymoon some motion-picture
photographers came in a speedboat and demanded that we come on deck
and have our pictures taken. We made no reply so for over six hours
they circled ... in the speedboat, just fast enough for the waves
to keep our boat rocking unpleasantly side to side, while they shouted
at us loudly.

Later, when
Lindberghs political views became known, the newsreel photographers,
in Lindberghs opinion, edited statements to make him seem
ridiculous. To speak for the newsreels on a political subject
is dangerous, he wrote, because one has no control over
the way they cut the picture or the setting in which they place
it .. By speaking for the newsreels, I take the chance that they
will cut my talk badly and sandwich it in between scenes of homeless
refugees and bombed cathedrals. Lindbergh continued: I
can never quite get over the times their men tried to sneak up behind
us with a microphone hidden under their coats.

Lindberghs
big mistake politically, as previously noted, was to accuse American
Jews of being one of the three groups pushing for American entry
into World War II, the other two being the Roosevelt administration
and the British government. Former President Hoover told Lindbergh
that mentioning the Jews in this way was a mistake even
if the statement was true. The Des Moines audience cheered loudly
when Lindbergh made his statement. However, the New York Times carried
bitter attacks on my speech from Jewish and other organizations
and from the White House.

General
Wood (the groups leader) has decided to hold a meeting of
the America First National Committee in Chicago (to discuss the
Lindbergh controversy). I must, of course, attend. I felt I had
worded my Des Moines address carefully and moderately. It seems
that almost anything can be discussed today in America except the
Jewish problem. The very mention of the word Jew is
cause for a storm, Personally, I feel that the only hope for a moderate
solution lies in an open and frank discussion.

It may also
be that American Jews had it in for Lindbergh because he fit the
profile of the north European or Aryan type that Nazi
propagandists touted. His blue-eyed, blond-hair good looks
were not the type of personal attractiveness that Jews favored under
those circumstances. When Lindbergh stayed in the Nordic room
in a Minneapolis hotel, Lindbergh noted in his diary that perhaps
in Minnesota he could get away with this without attracting hostile
comment.

Lindbergh
Revisionism

Despite
Lindberghs political efforts, the United States did go to
war against the Axis powers. Lindbergh served his country honorably
during the war and then gradually faded from public consciousness.
Lately, however, the political battles have returned in the form
of historical revisionism. Lindbergh, surrounded by Nazi emblems,
has regained the spotlight. This time, it is a battle for American
identity. Should Lindbergh, the historical person, be the dashing
hero that he was when he returned to America following his epoch
making flight across the Atlantic; or was he a vile Nazi sympathizer?
Does the handsome figure of Charles Lindbergh represent the best
this country has to offer or was he someone who wanted Jews to die
in concentration camps?

The more
pessimistic view is presented in a novel by Philip Roth, published
in 2004. The title is The Plot against America. It was
a Book-of-the-Month Selection. The stark image of a swastika imprinted
on a postage stamp adorns the cover of the book. So, right off the
bat, we know that Lindbergh was a Nazi and that he was engaged in
some kind of plot against America. In other words, he
was a traitor to his country.

What was
this plot against America in Roths novel? According
to its scenario, Charles Lindbergh ran for President in 1940 against
Franklin D. Roosevelt and won. One of the first things he did as
President was to negotiate a deal with the Nazis conceding to Germany
the European continent if Hitler would leave America alone. Then,
as President, Lindbergh concocted a scheme to make Americas
Jewish population go away.

An
organized campaign of anti-Semitism swept the nation during
Lindberghs administration, says a review of Roths
book,
and urban Jews were forced to relocate to small towns in
the South and West for purposes of assimilation ...
Jewish boys (like Roth) are sent off to work on Christian families
farms in the innocent-sounding Just Folks program.
President Lindbergh takes his single-engine plane out for daily
spins around
Washington, D.C., and sometimes cross-country to surprise his adoring
fans with impromptu cornfield pep talks.

The real
Lindbergh never ran for any political office. He was asked if he
would run for U.S. Senate from Minnesota, but he declined saying
that his talents did not lie in that field. The real Lindbergh was
not a traitor to his country but someone who argued passionately
for what he believed was his countrys interest and, when he
lost that fight, gladly served his country in combat after the Roosevelt
administration initially rejected his services. There was no relocation
of Jews to rural areas in America. There were no concentration camps
here for Jews. Instead, America put not only Japanese but Italians
and Germans in concentration camps during World War II. Some of
the German internees were not released until 1948 - three years
after the war. So much for historical accuracy.

Questioned
about this, Roth wrote an essay for the New York Times in which
he stressed that his work was fiction. At the same time,
his fictional work contained a lengthy postscript containing
real-life references to support the thesis. In other words, Roth
wants to have it both ways. The lies are, of course, fiction but
with a grain of truth, Roth wants us to believe. Then the conspicuous
swastika on the cover on a fictional novel about Charles A. Lindbergh
is enough to convince many in todays readers with limited
critical skills that Lindbergh was, in fact, a Nazi. The line between
news reporting (fact) and entertainment (fiction) is increasingly
blurred. Philip Roth knows, as did Dr. Goebbels, that any proposition
repeated enough times will eventually be believed. Were in
the era of branding.

Of significance
here is that Roth did not accuse the fictional Lindbergh of exterminating
Jews physically as the German Nazis did. He is accusing Lindbergh
of wanting to obliterate the Jewish identity in America. So this
is a fight over identity. The title of the book, The Plot
against America, suggests that the Jewish identity in America
is, in fact, the American identity. Lindbergh, the fictional President,
is attacking all Americans, not just Jewish Americans, when he wanted
Jews to assimilate in rural America.

One might
observe that Roth has a boundaries problem. The identities and interests
of Jewish Americans and of non-Jewish Americans are not the same
any more than it was true, as C.E. Wilson once said, that whats
good for General Motors is good for America. The title of
the book tells readers that what might happen to Jewish identity
under President Lindberghs relocation plan is a plot
against America. No, at most, it is a plot against Jewish
Americans or, I should say, some of the more paranoid Jewish Americans,
a plot which never happened.

Some Jewish
commentators and historians have a kinder take on Lindbergh. He
was not a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer but a dupe of the Nazis. Lindbergh,
the college drop-out, was a well-meaning individual who was over
his head in political matters. Like Henry Ford, he was mechanically
gifted but intellectually challenged. He was not able to withstand
the lure of Nazi propaganda. He was used by the Nazis
when in his role of America First spokesman he urged his fellow
countrymen to stay out of World War II.

The historical
writer Joy Hakim falls into this category. As a board member of
the National Council for History Education, she distributed a copy
of her book, A History of US: War, Peace, and all that Jazz,
1918-45. Page 75 is about Lindbergh, the hero of the transatlantic
flight. A side bar states: Lindbergh was a genuine hero as
long as he stuck to his specialty - flying. When he got involved
in politics, he was out of his league. More on that to come in this
book.

The other
shoe fell on page 115. In addition to a photograph of Lindbergh
standing next to a flag with a swastika, there are on the same page
pictures of Joseph Stalin, Father Coughlin, and a meeting of the
German-American Bund. The caption reads: Charles Lindbergh
urged Americans not to fight Hitler. He let his anti-war feelings
make him do and say things that he would later regret. He allowed
himself to be used by the Nazis. The America First Committee that
he supported got financial aid from Nazi Germany.

Financial
aid from Nazi Germany? That allegation did not make sense. The America
First committee did not need the Nazis money. Its steering
committee was comprised of well-heeled business leaders such as
the chairman of Sears Roebuck. Henry Ford once offered to bankroll
the whole operation. Furthermore, if this committee took money from
the Nazis and it became public, the news would completely ruin its
credibility just as if it were revealed that todays anti-war
movement got money from Saddam Hussein.

Neither
Hitler nor the America First committee leaders would have been so
stupid as to have financial relations. The motives of the America
First committee had more to do with heeding George Washingtons
advice to avoid foreign entanglements than with helping Hitler.
To say Lindberghs committee got money from the Nazis belittles
the principles behind the committee and makes Lindbergh out to be
more of a simpleton than he was.

I wrote
Joy Hakim asking her where she got her information. In return I
received a letter from her enclosing a photocopy of a page (page
294) from a book by Harold Evans titled The American Century.
She highlighted a number of passages. None of them had to do with
the America First Committee receiving money from the Nazis. Lindbergh
is labeled a sincere but stubborn man who read little.
The page is titled The Duping of a Hero. Fair enough,
there may have been some duping of Lindbergh, and of the entire
world, in light of what we later learned about Nazi Germany when
the concentration camps were revealed. But the Nazis did not provide
money to the America First Committee.

I wrote
another letter to Hakim pointing out the discrepancies and did not
receive a reply. So, my assumption is that this historical fact
was made up.

Foisting
an Alien Identity on Americans

It seems,
therefore, that Jews, or many Jews, are not friendly
to the reputation of either Henry Ford or Charles Lindbergh. Is
there a Jewish conspiracy in this regard? Who knows? While there
may be no elders of Zion orchestrating revisionist campaigns,
there are surely foot soldiers in that fight delivering a consistent
message in the schools, the entertainment world, and the press.

I asked
a teenage girl what she studied in her world-history course. Nazis,
she replied. (She said "slavery and discrimination" were
the focus of her American-history course.) She need not have added
that study of the Holocaust would be the core of what she learned
about Nazis. Yes, the Nazi horrors are important; but is this the
sum total of world history? Not without considerable political direction.
Where is the direction coming from?

An email
calendar listed a three-part workshop for educators put on by the
University of Minnesotas Center for Holocaust and Genocide
Studies. This series of workshops, said the notice, was intended
to bring the Holocaust home and to make an abstraction
literally tangible by familiarizing teachers (and thereby their
students) with Midwest connections to Nazi Germany.

The
course is introduced, on day one, as Small-Group survey of Prior
Knowledge of Nazi Persecution and the Holocaust, as Experienced in
the American Heartland. The Second hour is called Eugenics
in America, a Model for the Nazis. The Third Hour is outlined:

Anti-Semitism
in the Midwest
Minnesota: Historical Anti-Semitic Capital of the U.S.
Henry Ford: Between Industry and Bigotry
Charles Lindbergh: Minnesotas Hero or Anti-Semite?

What we
have here, therefore, is a training course for teachers intended
to bring a discussion into the public schools of how Henry Ford
and Charles Lindbergh might have been anti-Semitic bigots. Ford
is a bigot because his company briefly sponsored a publication that
put Jews in a negative light. Lindbergh is a bigot because he agitated
to keep the United States out of war.

An organized
pressure group has thus managed to insert this agenda into training
courses for credit for teachers, who will put it into their courses
and into the testing, which will force students who want good grades
to master the course materials. Henry Ford will not be the extraordinary
man with a vision of a better society who, more than anyone else,
created the mobile society of 20th Century America, but someone
who spent much of his time thinking hateful thoughts about Jews.
And so with Lindbergh - he will be the one scheming to bring the
Nazi type of society to America. Theyre both anti-Semites,
end of story.

This is
a gross distortion of American history. It is pure defamation
of
two authentic American heroes. But as a scheme to convince Americans
that the interests of the Jewish community are identical to
theirs,
it makes sense. Its a fight for identity - whether an organized
interest group can infiltrate the classroom and the news and entertainment
media to make people believe that someone elses concerns
are superior to their own, that ones highest duty as an ethical
human being is to avoid being anti-Semitic and therefore
like Hitler, and adopt the dark Manichaean division of peoples
into enemies and
friends that this particular agenda entails.

The practical
consequence of refusing to reclaim our American identity is that
we become servants to militaristic policies that bring shame upon
our nation. Both Ford and Lindbergh were reviled in their day for
seeking peace. So today the people who oppose the war in Iraq and,
possibly, in Iran are reviled as appeasers of tyrants or anti-Semitic
lunatics. America has never stood for invading other peoples
countries (unless it was Canada or Mexico). At least, we would want
to think we are for world peace and want friendly relations with
other people.

But, in
the past five years, the Bush Administration has invaded Iraq, a
country which posed no direct military threat to the United States.
It did, however, pose a military threat to Israel. So now American
soldiers must die so that Israel can be secure. We must take out
Irans nuclear facilities because of the risk Israel might
face if that nation acquired weapons of mass destruction.

In the 1970s
and 1980s, Israeli assassins combed Europe in search of scientists
who were working on weapons projects for Saddam Hussein. Israeli
pilots took out Iraqs nuclear reactors. But now Israel has
found an attack dog to do this kind of dirty work on its behalf.
In the United States, it has found its own Hitler, ready
to wage wars of aggression against potential enemies of the Jewish
state. We Americans allow this because we have a weak national identity.
Our true national heroes have been defamed. We allow someone else
to tell us whose interest we must protect. Ralph Nader once called
Israel prime minister Ariel Sharon the chief Israeli puppeteer,
President Bush being the puppet. The Anti-Defamation League promptly
called him a "bigot".

Writing
with candor that might not be heard in the United States, however,
Israeli journalist Uri Avnery wrote in the aftermath of the U.S.
military victory in Iraq that "the small group that initiated
this war - an alliance of Christian fundamentalists and Jewish neo-conservatives
- has won big ... (T)he so-called neo-cons ... almost all of whose
members are Jewish ... hold the key positions in the Bush administration,
as well as in the think-tanks that play a important role in formulating
American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential newspapers."

"Seemingly
all this is good for Israel. America controls the world, we control
America. Never before have Jews exerted such an immense influence
on the center of world power. But this tendency troubles me. We
are like a gambler who bets all his money and his future on one
horse. A good horse, a horse with no current competitor, but still
one horse ... The Bible tells us about the kings of Judea, who relied
on the then world power, Egypt ... An Assyrian general told the
king of Judea: 'Behold, thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised
reed, upon Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand
and pierce it.' Bush and his gang of neo-cons is not a bruised reed
... But should we bet our whole future on this?"

Therefore,
its worth defending the memory of people like Thomas Edison,
Henry Ford, and Charles Lindbergh, who were symbols of American
progress in a happier time. The lies told about them by novelists
and historians are lies told against ourselves. We are the ones
who ought to define who we are as a people, not malicious writers
whose works are picked up by the Book-of-the-Month Club or manipulators
of courses in American history.

The first
step is to find heroes among our own people - not someone elses
people. Then it is to resist those who would defame those heroes
as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh have been defamed. The challenge
is to find the goodness in our own people and in our own culture
and to expand the cultural space in which that goodness can grow.
It is certainly not to become a militaristic people who attack others
on cue. It is to live our lives in peace. It is to create things
that contribute to a better society. Go and do likewise as Lindbergh
and Ford once did.

To do all
this, we must first find our own identity. We must find it ourselves
rather than accept a package from someone else. The packages are
out there, thick as credit-card offers. Take a look at them if you
please but pick what best serves your own needs. Think for yourself.
Spend a little time.